Anne of Green Gables

Anne Shirley falls in love with the rambling farmhouse called Green Gables the moment she sees it. Unfortunately she is not quite what Marilla Cuthbert and her brother Matthew were expecting: they had applied to the orphanage for a boy to help them on their the farm, not a skinny eleven-year-old girl with a head full of romantic notions. At first Marilla is adamant that Anne should be sent back, but relents when she hears about the girl's wretched life. Matthew - though he would never interfere - is clearly already bewitched by the spirited red-head who has a temper to match her hair.

Production Details

‘A children's book that follows you into adulthood’

‘A huge cherry-tree grew outside, so close that its boughs tapped against the house, and it was so thickset with blossoms that hardly a leaf was to be seen . . . Wasn't it a lovely place?’

For the novelist Margaret Atwood, Anne of Green Gables, set in the idyllic countryside of Canada’s Prince Edward Island, was so much a part of her childhood that she cannot remember when she first read it. And at one level it is just that – a marvellous children's book in which the resourceful heroine’s vivid imagination lands her in endless scrapes: she mistakes currant wine for raspberry cordial, puts liniment instead of vanilla into a cake and dyes her flaming hair green. But as Atwood writes in her introduction, this is a book – like Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist and The Secret Garden – that pursues you into adulthood.

As a young writer, L. M. Montgomery had dreams and ambitions, just like her heroine, yet she could scarcely have anticipated the huge impact of Anne of Green Gables on successive generations: ‘grandparents, school and college boys, old pioneers in the Australian bush, monks in remote monasteries, premiers of Great Britain and red-haired people all over the world have told me how they loved Anne’. Few chrildren‘s books have had the enduring influence of Montgomery‘s creation, and this is the perfect edition to explore or rediscover its charms.

‘One of those books you feel almost guilty liking because so many other people seem to like it as well’Margaret Atwood

Reviews

"Charming edition of a classic young adult tale. Adorable cover and illustrations and bright yellow endpapers make the reading experience a cheerful one. Happy to see this work get the Folio treatment."